


Savage Delight

by DeathCorporal



Category: Dracula - Bram Stoker
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Anal Sex, Aroused Victim, Blood As Lube, Blood Drinking, Blood Sharing, Dreams and Nightmares, Epistolary, Frottage, M/M, Mind Control, Oral Sex, Period Typical Attitudes, Unreliable Narrator, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-11
Updated: 2020-07-11
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:48:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24568741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeathCorporal/pseuds/DeathCorporal
Summary: A series of papers purporting to be excerpted from the diary of one Jonathan Harker, dated May through July of 1893.
Relationships: Dracula/Jonathan Harker
Comments: 26
Kudos: 165
Collections: Nonconathon 2020





	Savage Delight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FleetSparrow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FleetSparrow/gifts).



9 May.

It is some little time before dusk as I write, and I am filled with awful fears that I would not confess elsewhere. Mina has told me often that she finds comfort in putting her worries to paper: that it is like making a friend of oneself to whom you might whisper your heartaches. As I am friendless here, I suppose I must be my own confidant.

Perhaps it is something suspended in the atmosphere of this wild country that breeds strange dreams, or perhaps it is merely some upset of the nerves from so much nocturnal living. What I know, however, is that I never suffered such nightmares in England, and what I dreamed last night has shaken me through to my marrow.

I retired but a little before dawn, having sat in the Count’s company while he recounted to me again his ancestors’ conduct throughout so many battles. He told me of how the Dracula had been among those brave men who vexed the Pasha at Michaza--of how Tergowisch was wrested at last from the Turk.

I was not in all ways as attentive to his stories as I had been in nights past, for the realities of my imprisonment were beginning to weigh upon me and my thoughts were distracted. As he spoke, however, eyes twinkling in the firelight, I recall that I spent a long time gazing at the physiognomy of his face and at the way his black shirt hung along his thin frame. There was something to him that seemed to draw my gaze that night, as though some crude animal force had latched onto my soul and demanded my attention.

When I became clearly exhausted and ready to retire, the Count walked to where I sat and laid one of his long, thin hands on my shoulder. There was something uncommonly sweet-smelling about him as he leaned over me--almost cloying--like flowers on the verge of rot.

“My good friend Mr. Harker,” he said. “You must pardon an old man’s poor manners. I can see that you are tired and should be left to your rest.”

I told him, perhaps a bit untruthfully, that I had enjoyed his stories of the evening. He smiled, running a finger along the seam of my coat’s shoulder.

“You do much to flatter me, Mr. Harker.” He moved his other hand suddenly to my chin, tilting it upwards so that our eyes met.

“I hope you have dreams tonight that are so flattering to yourself.”

I did not quite take his meaning, nor did I ask him to clarify. Instead I thanked him again for his company and took my leave, shivering slightly as I realized that some of the coldness of his touch lingered upon the skin of my face.

It was not long after that I lay in my bed, waiting for sleep to take me. I do not recall if I was awake or dreaming at the time it happened. The sky was still black, but I heard the chatter of birdsong, and I recall that I looked out of my window and saw the morningstar already peeking out over the east. I let my gaze linger upon it a little while, and as I did so it seemed to me that it doubled--as though a star could split apart from itself and divide like some animalcule under a lens.

I looked at that double-star, which seemed to shift and wink as if it were two eyes looking back at me, and I heard suddenly the familiar toll of the cathedral bell back at Exeter. With a clarity that still seems to me too sharp for dreaming, I suddenly felt myself carried back to England, as if I could fly there in an instant and find myself out by South Street again, waiting for the sound of Mina’s Raleigh to clatter down the pavement stones.

And then, as if thought could summon another soul to me, Mina arrived, warm and winded from the three mile ride between Mrs. Templeton’s and myself. I realized then, as I raised my hat, that recent events were to play out again: that she would smile at my address and ask if I were headed home to Mr. Hawkins and from there to inquire politely if I were going up for my exams soon. I felt the ring burn in my pocket. I could see the red bloom of her cheeks before it appeared. We would be in a little garden together soon enough, and she would breathe out the one word for which I had spent twenty years living in anticipation.

And then before any of it could happen, she kissed me.

She kissed me in the street, brazen as sin, and although I knew the wrongness of it, something in her eyes--bright and hard as diamonds--made me kiss her back. It was with quite the passion of two who should be husband and wife already that we embraced, mouths hot and frantic as if we meant to draw “with one long kiss our whole souls through our lips,” and though I knew the whole of the city might be watching in scandalized dismay, I was too taken with some fever of the instant to stop.

I know not how it happened, but I felt myself suddenly pressed flat against a mattress, and the blue sky over Exeter became the leaded ceiling of a bedroom. What I took for Mina clutched itself close against me, and in that instant I could have no sentiment for propriety, so overtaken was I with the voluptuous thrill of the moment. I grabbed her fast, fingers trembling against her as I anticipated delights of the marriage bed--prematurely taken though they might be. 

Her eyes flashed like comets as I felt her hands glide to my wrists, and I was suddenly taken with a strange languor as “she” pinned them against the bed. I could not move as I recognized that the tongue that caressed my lips was rough--almost sharp, like that of a cat. 

I looked to the thing atop me--What else could I do?--and I saw the pale and leering face of the Count where Mina’s should be.

“Be still, my little fool,” he said in a low whisper. “Your employer bade you follow all my instructions.”

I had no choice then but to obey him. My body would not resolve itself to action. Through half-lidded eyes I could only look at him dimly as I felt him pull apart the fabric of my nightclothes, the soft hairs that grew over his palms setting my skin into a hypersensitive tremor as he caressed my flesh. I would have shuddered if I could--I was still full of that anticipatory lust that Mina’s image had left me with--but I found myself unable to move, as though my spirit had been set apart from my body and left to hover a few inches above it.

He kissed me again as he rent the clothing from me, and between the flash of his eyes and the cold press of that cold mouth upon my lips, I thought I might faint into some deeper slumber still. I must confess now--forgive me Mina!--that as he continued to lay hands upon me, I wished less and less to hinder him. By the time I felt the pressure of another body against mine--felt my swollen manhood against his flesh--I was almost desirous things should proceed as they seemed they would. I almost wished that he should do all manner of wickedness to me.

“You must remember who you belong to now, Mr. Harker,” he said with a dark look befitting of every devil and Mephisto of the stage. “Remember that even if you remember nothing else.

With that, he pressed his lips to my throat, and I felt a sharp sting that thereafter melted into a most queer and horrid sense of pleasure. I felt myself come back to myself then, and I gasped beneath him, suddenly alive and moving as he held me there. I trembled as I felt the rough caress of his hand along my parts, touching me with an obscene wantonness that could not refuse. It is with the most extreme sense of shame that I must relate how in that haze of memory, my body arced up to meet him.

We continued like that for some time. I must tell myself that the logic of dreams leads a man through sins he would not otherwise countenance, but--God--what a bitter shame it is with which I write of how I _dreamed_ he used me. He was rough--insistent--his sharp-nailed hand stroking my prick as he continued again and again to put his mouth to me.

“Oh, you are young,” he said eagerly, lightly biting again and again into the flesh of my neck. “You must lend an old man your strength.”

I suppose I cried out a little each time he was at my throat, for he seemed to grow ill-tempered as he continued. Each bite had the same awful sense that he was piercing me through with something that intermingled a man’s pleasures and pains together, as though he struck some secret nerve that should touch the organs governing both at once. I remember that I shuddered--wept--as I recognized that I must be bleeding:-- as I imagined the blood running down my exposed throat in gouts as though he had made a collar of red with which to snare me. 

He lapped at me like an animal as he continued to abuse me, and I lay there, hot and agonized as I rutted into his hand like another animal still. There was a sinking nausea that I had ever thought of Mina; it seemed a dishonor to her that I should intermingle her memory with anything like _this_. It seems near to a dishonor that I even inscribe her name here in recounting it. As we progressed, I tried to think only of the immediate sensations available to me after a while: of the teeth like white hot needles that pierced my skin and the rough, unrelenting hand that gripped me hard.

The Count chuckled as he quickened his pace, and he took pains to kiss me with his red, mocking lips more than once, drawing a hateful moan from me as I tasted my own blood upon them. 

“You bring me quite back to life, you know, and I think you will learn to savor such kisses after a time,” he said upon breaking one such kiss. “If not, I assure you that I shall savor them for both of us.”

He bit me hard after that, and I cried out sharply as I felt myself spill against my belly, In that culminating abasement, I wished quite that he should devour me whole--that he should drain out the life from me entirely and allow my poor soul to leave the depraved scene of its ruin.

He laughed to see me thus, and I wept--hot and humiliated--as he kissed me one last time. Whether I was in Transylvania or London or Exeter became unclear, as the room and its trappings warped and transformed themselves about me. I awoke then, still swooning from the dull metallic taste of blood upon my lips.

There was the shameful evidence of my dreams slick against my body, although I took some great relief in finding that my garments were in no way damaged. I have been able to find no marks about my neck and throat, although it is hard to inspect such things without the aid of a proper mirror. 

God in his mercy can forgive me the sins of a fevered night’s imagining easily enough, but--oh--such dreams still weigh heavy on a poor man’s soul. I have resolved to myself that I must not dwell morbidly upon this night. My fears are here written out, and I must hope that the writing exorcises me of them.

I pray--if these words fall before the eyes of any other than myself--that you not linger on them long and destroy these papers thereafter.

* * *

22 May.

Oh God--would that I had words sufficient to capture the shape of these nightmares! After the vision of those three horrifying women:-- I know not how many times I have not only wondered but _hoped_ myself mad. To admit some granule of truth of that encounter alone would seem a monstrousness worse than madness, but now… it seems fitting to _pray_ for lunacy!

The Count _knows_ that I am his prisoner and he my gaoler, although as I have oft written, he will in no way betray that this is our understood relationship. He _certainly_ betrays no knowledge of my dreams, though I sometimes catch upon his face expressions that I swear I saw only in the agony of my sleeping hours.

Yesterday, he spent the early evening reading through a little bound volume of _Lancet_ issues, asking me with a completely cordial air if I had any thoughts as to recent discoveries concerning the link between injuries to the brain and monomania. It was a strange question to ask, and I confessed freely that in the business of my exams, I had allowed myself to fall behind as regarded public discoveries in the sciences, and that it was not a field with which I had ever been greatly familiar.

“Really, Mr. Harker,” he said in seeming surprise. “I thought that all men of your modern England must have _something_ of the scientist in them.”

I did not answer before he continued.

“For a country to so dominate the world it inhabits, it must have mastery not only of the might of armies. I had long thought that what had driven your little England to such triumphs over the earth had been its aptitude for uncovering her secrets. Your Darwin for example set the stage for reevaluating the origin of our races, and your Dr. Jackson has made such progress in discovering the origins of the mind. Surely it follows that with men's pasts and men’s intellects mapped before you-- _that_ was what afforded you your right of conquest.”

He smiled, looking at me in a way that left me shuddering.

“An animal that knows its place in the natural order, after all, is the one most expertly suited to the hunt.”

There was something in his tone--something strange and harsh--that recalled to me that moment when he towered above that nest of gorgonish women, face contorted in a burning rage. It was as if some quality of that moment of diablerie had been transposed into a look of placid calm, but somehow yet retained the germ of its violence.

The Count was silent that night at supper, and I did not provoke him to speech. He retired early, but I had a strange and desultory feeling about me that was ill-suited to exploration. I did not, this night, make any venture to uncover more of the particulars of my prison.

Instead, I conducted myself as I usually did in going to bed, and I saw no dividing stars or whirling dust to set me on a morbid course of thought. I dreamt something about the windy and vast forests outside of the castle--of the beasts that dwell there and the blue flames that I had seen on the Eve of St. George’s. I recall myself being on hands and knees in one of the many fields and valleys I had passed on the road out of Klausenberg, and that I was trying to unearth something set beneath a cairn that was lit through with that strange foxfire glow I had seen on my first night in the Count’s wild desmenes.

My hands were cold as clay as I dug about in the earth, and I thought for a moment I heard some strange music as men claim they hear when on the verge of dying. It was inhuman and grating--something like the rasp of stone against stone or metal against metal. I realized only as I heard the fast approach of some body hurtling towards mine that it was the baying of the wolves.

Things happened very fast then, and I hadn’t time to panic before the creature was upon me. Like a juggernaut, it mowed into me, knocking me over and trampling upon me until I lay pressed underneath it, its sharp claws scraping against my chest. I cannot here adequately write out the horror it was to recognize that I suddenly found my limbs once again deprived of power as the animal lay atop me. It was with the panic of any poor beast in the jaws of its hunter that I tried--if only in thought--to struggle, and it was with the despair of the condemned that I realized the inutility of doing so. 

The wolf was black and huge--in mass more like a lion or bear. Its eyes were of a dark ruddy color and glowed like two garnets set against a black backing. As it knelt to lap at me, it seemed as though it would press every particle of air out of lungs. I tried in that moment to scream, but as with all other motion, that comfort was taken from me.

It lapped at the contours of my face--at the stubble of my beard and the dewy tears that had fallen unbidden from my eyes. When it transformed again into the slender shape of the Count, I felt a sudden and terrible calm. It was as though I had reached the limits of my dread and come into a place where my fears lie so deep that I could not fall into them further.

He was there above me, pale and leering and filled with a savage hunger. Whatever weighed down my limbs was not so complete as to keep me entirely inert, and I felt myself tremble as he began to undress me. The forest and the chamber seemed to whirl and mix about me, and the towering trees around me seemed at some points to be nothing more than the four posts of my poor wretched bed.

“Do you know what the Pasha was rumored to do with handsome boys given to him as captives, Mr. Harker?” He ran a hand caressingly alongside my jaw, and I trembled. “I suspect it is yet another science about which you Englishmen are so reticent of your knowledge.”

His hands were hard against my flesh, gripping it tight as his talon-like fingernails seemed to shear the cloth away from me. I finally cried out, and found that no sound came from my mouth when I opened it.

He maneuvered a finger into my open mouth then and held it there, keeping my jaw half open as he dragged my body about with his free hand to suit his design. Time did not seem to keep to its course anymore than my surroundings did, and I only dimly recognized the chain of events that led me to that moment of crisis, when I knelt there naked and numb, and realized what it was I was being made to do.

I recall the bite of his nails as they glanced across the back of my head, his fist curling into the back of my hair as he guided me forward. 

God! I should end here, I should end here, tear out the leaf and throw it upon the fire, but I must write! I know not how I will continue if I do not put it down somewhere! I would cry it into the mud like Midas’ hairdresser if I did not fear that _He_ should hear me!

The Count had produced his member from out of his trousers. It was a long thing--well fitted to a man of his height and proportions. I was imbued in some ways with a limited motion that evidently allowed me to recoil somewhat, for he commented on my discomfort.

“Do not be so shocked, Mr. Harker. It is a part whose existence cannot be a new discovery to you. Please see it well tended as you tend to the rest of my person.”

He laughed a little as he dragged me forward, and I found when he forced himself down my throat, that whatever the spell was upon me, it forbade me to gag. Oh God in heaven--what can I write here that might expunge the instant from my thoughts and transfer it to paper. He used me brutally, thrusting himself down the full length of my throat as if I were some instrument devoid of any feeling. I could only kneel there, obedient and malleable as he drove hard into me, groaning as an animal does in its passions.

“Oh… you are learning, Mr. Harker. You are learning to at last make yourself useful as I would use you.”

He plunged into me hard then, stilling himself as though he were on the precipice of his climax. Though I had not the power of voluntary weeping, I could feel that my cheeks were growing wet.

“In the nights to come, I would like to think that you will come to appreciate your new place in the chain of existence. You shall--bit by bit--die to yourself and come to live as I would have you: a creature that has found its place and knows the voice of its master.”

He pulled my head hard against his hips then, laughing as he spent himself down my throat. I remember feeling a terrible pained sharpness from somewhere within me, as though my heart were about to crack and mangle itself thundering against my breast. He petted my hair a moment, and then cast me to the ground with a laugh, falling upon me with unslackened rapaciousness as he fell once more to biting my pale flesh.

I remember now, as I lay there, with the bitter taste of his spend on my lips, how I writhed and convulsed in the midst of his “kisses”--how I would come back to myself and find it in me to use my body only to lose its use again. As I lay there--in the field or on my bed--I lost track of who or what it was that assailed me. Some stupor set over my brain, and as the dream reached its frenzied climax, I did not know whether it was beast or man or something else altogether that was leaving its mark upon me.

I felt the wretched thrill of teeth against my white flesh, boring into my wrists, my chest, the inside of my thighs where the skin is sensitive. I felt a wild and horrible desire that I should be bitten. Whether it be Mina or those wretched women or the Count or some other devil or brute, I _wanted_ the lips and teeth of that thing upon me.

I felt myself harden as it continued--as it sucked at the edge of my hip bone and trailed bruising, bloodied kisses towards the base of my prick. I recall thinking at that moment with a blasphemous fervor, that I wanted it--him--to do unto me as I had been made to do. I thought that beyond that, I should like whatever creature it was who held me captive might devour me whole.

I felt the pressure of a tongue--the dint of hard teeth, the caress of a warm and hungry mouth--as if the vapor of my thoughts had condensed into palpable reality. I cannot explain what it was I felt then, stung all over with biting, shot through with the mortification of my own damnable lust. I remember that in that lacework of shadows and trees and half-realized animality, I suddenly was able to push life into my numb limbs and raise myself to look at the _thing_ that had held me.

It was the Count and it was not. It was as if a great absence was before me: the black outline of the thing that should be a person, grabbing me with its bladed hands and taking my engorged prick into itself. I did not fight, despite the power to do so being once more upon me. I gasped and moaned like the most dissolute of wantons, and I dug my hands into its substance--feeling suddenly as if they were sunk deep into the cold chill of the earth again as I pulled that black shape to me and rutted into it like a beast.

“Oh…” I heard some voice say in wicked triumph. “...oh, but you do learn.”

Oh God, oh God, oh God in heaven--How can I invoke you on these pages or in my brain and not blaspheme in doing so. I let that shape--that mass of fanning shadows--do with me as it would, and as that diabolic scene finally met its inevitable terminus, I relished the stabbing ecstasy of those needle-like teeth piercing me through.

I woke after that, cold and trembling again in the twilight of my room. While there is evidence of my dreams slick against my body, I take some great relief in finding that my clothing is whole; my body is unmarked; there is no trace of wolves or forests or things of shadow about my room.

I must record, however, that the little crucifix once given me by that dear old woman had fallen from where it was set over my bed, and when I finally discovered it behind one of the moth-eaten curtains of my chamber, I found that the chain was broken--one of the links torn apart as though it had been wrenched apart with great force.

I have not yet eaten this day. I do not know if I shall. I fear that I am on the precipice of madness, and that to sit once more in the Count’s company would drive me into the Abyss.

* * *

27 May.

I recalled to myself today that I have written dreadful things here upon waking, that there are half-remembered dreams that I scratched into the paper of this journal upon waking in sickness. I had such a dream last night, I think: of being kissed and tormented--of having wretched things done to me by something against which I could not fight.

Upon looking for past precedents of such nightmares, however, I found nothing. It was only upon a close inspection of all my records thus far that I discovered to myself the thin seam of torn pages in between several of my diary entries.

Heaven help me. The Count has been altering my diary, and I am without recollection as to what it was that I once set down!

* * *

6 June.

What is happening to me? What monstrousness has befallen me that I must live out such sickly horrors during those hours that should be a place of rest and repose!? 

Perhaps it is something in the atmosphere of this wild country that breeds strange dreams, or perhaps it is some upset from too much nocturnal living. What I know, however, is that I never suffered such nightmares in England. Oh--what I dreamed last night has shaken me to my marrow.

I recall that I had just left the Count for the evening. He had been telling me of some ill-starred past battle: one in which that omnipresent Transylvanian bugbear--the Turk--had won the day. I had been heartsick that day, for some melancholy remembrance weighed upon me. I was thinking of my offices by Northernhay and how I had spoken to Mr. Hawkins about replacing the old Hansen once I was through with exams. It was strange, but I took it then as given that I should never see a typewriter again--that my employer might already have procured a new model and thus wasted his money on a machine I should never use. 

I told myself that I must not give in to such melancholy thoughts. It behooves me to continue to search out the means of my escape from this damnable labyrinth of a castle. I determined last night that I should retire early in the hopes of waking but a little after the sunrise. The daylight has been my ally, for as I have observed before, it has never fallen to me that I should see the Count moving by day.

Oh Lord in Heaven--I regret this misstep grievously now. If daylight is a friend to me, I was a fool not to let her stand guard as I slept. 

I recall that I was not yet abed when I felt a sudden chill pass over the room: one perversely out of place for a hot summer night. I was in the altogether when I suddenly heard a slow, strange, keening that set every hair on my body on end. Frightened, I drew near to the window, bunching my dressing gown before myself.

I feared then that I would be made to witness some new horror, given the ill-starred scenes I have already seen. Upon looking, however, all seemed as it should be. The mountains were quiet, the forest dark, the air warm and redolent with pollen. The only thing that struck me as odd was that the stars seemed more numerous in some way. I felt in that moment that there was something queer and unfixed about them--as though they might fall from their place in the firmament like so much snow. 

I turned then, and saw to my horror a shape, alternately dark and pale by turns, that seemed to tower in the room beside me. I have since told myself--and I tell myself here again--that I must have been sleeping then and dreamed the thing. It had the character of a phantom one sees upon waking: of an old coat or crumpled drapery that takes on a sinister character in that twilight between sleep and full alertness.

I tried to focus my gaze upon it, but it would not resolve. Instead, all things in the room about me took on a similar type of strangeness. The wardrobe suddenly seemed a lumpy mass of blotches. The window transmuted into an indistinct portal of light. 

I gave a shout as I felt something--cold as brandy rubbed over the skin--grab my arm and wrench me naked onto the vast tableau of colorless space beneath me.

“I have looked so forward to our next _tête-à-tête_ , Mr. Harker.”

I heard the Count’s voice, and suddenly I was run through with a horrified sensation that I had been in such a place and subject to such visions before. Even now, it seems to me that there is some terrible past dream that this dream draws upon: that all the wretchedness of which I write has a precedent.

Everything happened quickly after that. I recall thinking it a lucky thing that I had the power of struggling--even if all my struggles were to no avail. 

God.

What a horror it is to tell of it--how can I say what it was to have his hands on my naked body, to feel myself caught in his grip like some moth or butterfly bound in the iron snares of the spider?

“I have very much enjoyed your accounts of how you have weathered my past lessons. You have such a vivid eye for description, Mr. Harker. You could have been quite the poet in an earlier age.”

I remember that he wrenched my wrist back sharply, and I gave forth a little shout in response. It was then that he dove his head forward to kiss me long and hard on the lips. His breath, which I have previously mentioned as being rank, seemed transformed. It was sweet--almost cloying--like flowers on the verge of rot. I quite froze in his embrace, shocked and disgusted that I should be thus abused. 

God--to be so used, to be made a subject of such voluptuary appetites by any _man_ , let alone whatever this thing is who masquerades as one. I cannot with this trembling pen convey the horror that thrilled through me as I felt him clasp my naked body against his, what it was like to have my flesh pressed against his cold and angular frame as though I were his creature.

When the kiss broke, he laughed a little, holding me by the chin as I felt the heat of defiant tears stinging in my eyes. In that strange unreality of shifting shapes, I could see his hair was no longer white, but that it had taken on an ashen grey hue of a man only beginning to enter his later years. His features, as he gazed upon me with a look of detached triumph, also seemed to correspond to those of a much younger man.

“You are such a delight to me, Mr. Harker--a thousand different indignities you put on in all of these little dances of ours. I should like some day for you to remember all and wear them all at once--for you to recall and record all the pleasures I take of you and feel their full weight.”

I felt him press me into the ground or floor or bed beneath us, and I shouted that he stop this:--that he not subject a guest and fellow creature to such evil. He laughed as he straddled me, and I realized then--in this fog of dreaming--that he, like myself, was unclothed. 

I felt him then, his lean angular body strangely cool against mine as he pressed me down in his iron grip, as he forced himself betwixt my two legs and brought his parts shamefully to rest against mine. I tried to fight, and he laughed at me before pressing his lips against the taut flesh overlying my collarbone.

I do not think I can find words to describe what it was like then. I felt the quick sting of something sharp and needlelike in my skin and I was filled thereafter with the euphoric rush of some sensation equal parts bitter and sweet: an admixture of pleasure and pain that could not be disentangled from one another. I felt in that moment as if this were not the first time such a kiss came upon me, and I moaned as I felt the animal heat of my own prick hardening. I wept soon thereafter.

He trailed his sharp kisses down along my chest, drawing gouts of blood from where he tasted me. As he did so, he began to rut against my still body. The feel of his tongue and lips cold and hard against my flesh sent me to shivering, and I cried out some ways as I felt the horrid power of his bite bringing me to a crest of furious and shameful arousal. He held me by the throat then with one taloned hand, and with the other he began to stoke us together where we lay prick to prick.

“Oh that I should make this night mine in all ways, Mr. Harker--oh that I should do all I wish to you!”

I tried to rebuke him, but my words died in my throat. What could I say in such straits? How could I speak? I whined like an animal as he toyed with me--as he caressed my naked flank.

“I think I shall make good sport of you in the meantime. A good dish wants seasoning before it is savored, does it not? A beast wants breaking in before it is fit to ride.” He bit hard into my throat then. “Oh--but you fill me with life!”

It was not the last time he bit me. He held me there in an ecstasy of sin, the two of us rutting together until I spent hard against him--until he turned me about and forced me to take him in my hands and afterwards my mouth. In all this abasement, his stamina never seemed to wane. 

I remember that it seemed almost dull in its repetition at points, how he would wrench my head, gagging, onto his member and hold me there while he pistoned into me--laughing as I struggled, as I choked, as I tried to bite. In the case of the latter, it seemed to have quite the opposite effect I would like. He was in no way pained, and seemed to savor in some way the sensation, for he wrenched himself farther down my poor, much abused throat as I did so, leaving me struggling for breath. After he finished that time, he struck me rather badly, and held me up thereafter that he might lap the blood flowing freely from my nose and mouth.

It seemed an eternity that I was thus treated, increasingly stained by the exertions of the sin forced upon me--being made again and again into the instrument of his pleasure. 

“Oh soon, my good friend, soon you will enjoy the full consummation of a bridal feast, and you will have no more bad dreams to torment you. Soon, you will know me in every form and fashion, and you shall be mine down to your marrow.”

He spent in me again shortly after, slender hips pressed hard against my face while I was made to drink some admixture of his seed and my own spilled blood. It pains me in every way to write this nightmare--to scratch out these wretched thoughts not fit for man to contemplate in the privacy of his most secret mind--but I feel I must. Oh God, I must relay the horrid revelation I had in the midst of this depravity.

As I lay there, bleeding, sick and stinking of damnation, I remember a sudden sense of startling familiarity overtaking me. It was as if, in that instant, the terminus of this wretched encounter showed itself as the recurring outcome of one, of two--of a dozen--such nightmares. It was as if I suddenly saw with horrific clarity that this was not the first time I have suffered thus.

I am at the point of illness as I write. When I next became aware of myself, my body was clean, and free of any mark or blemish. 

It was as if all that had just happened was a fever dream--a bout of delusion, perhaps. I thought at first that I should put it out of mind and attribute it to a mind overwrought by all else I have witnessed here--that it was but a natural extension of the horrors I have seen to see horrors not there. In putting this to page--in alleviating my sorrows with writing--I thought I might stand some chance of bringing myself to see the folly over taking these imaginings for truth.

However, although there is no evidence of any of the diablerie I have described, I must write here something more terrible than all I have written above.

As I prepared to open this diary, my hand chanced to glance upon the little crucifix that I had previously thought to hang over my bed. I had begun to keep it over my papers for a time, out of some habit I have not yet been able to place.

As I touched it, to open this little volume and write what I am writing now, I felt a burst of pain upon the hand that touched it, as though I were picking it up from the center of a hot fire.

The hand that now writes of the occurrence still throbs, even if it bears no mark.

Oh heaven--oh Christ in all your mysteries--how could you let a man fall so far from grace that it should come to this--that the impurity of my dreams should lie imprinted on my skin!?

* * *

11 June

I have grown thinner as of late. There is a strange dread I have of sleeping, and I awake often feel more exhausted than I had upon lying down to rest. I have taken to writing less frequently here as well, and often when I set about to do so, I find myself forgetful of the things that I would write.

* * *

19 June.

I awoke this evening, breath nearly knocked from my body as though I had fallen from a great height. I thought at the moment that I was in the clutches of those three beastly women, or else that I had been made to witness them at their repast. Then, when I saw that there was nothing to worry me but the shadows of my room and the furniture therein, I had the strangest sense that there was something that I had need of recalling.

I opened this diary in the hopes of finding some useful record here, and I made the discovery that should now be evident to anyone who shall ever have the fortune to find this tragic record of mine:

Nearly half the leaves on which I ought have written are missing.

Nearly half of my life in this wretched place has been effaced from any recollection.

* * *

  
1 July.

Mina, 

I open with your name knowing that the circumstances under which I do so are abhorrent to the degree that calling upon you seems a blasphemy. I open with your name anyway, as I fear that this may be the last testament that I--poor Jonathan Harker--am ever to give. If you read this, my darling, or if there is somebody who has carried this last poor part of me to you--I plead with you, I beg of you to read no farther. Know only that I loved you better than anything, and that whatever transpires after my pen leaves this page will not alter that fact.

  
  
  
  
  


_“Tonight is mine”_

Those were the words that the Count left his women with yesterday evening, and that is a promise that he has since fulfilled. I wrote last here that I intended to brave the walls of the castle in the hopes of making my escape. 

I do not wish to fill up this page with all the particulars of my failure. I take some pride in saying that I made it to the earth more or less unharmed--that I managed to climb the bricks until I was at such a height that the fall I took was not fatal. I was not--however--to remain long at liberty.

The Count came for me--or rather I came to him. While I ran as best I could through this wilderness by day, I learned when the moon rose that I was not my own master. At first, I thought myself lost when the sun finally sank behind the mountains. I came to think that perhaps the country itself played tricks on wanderers and that I had been made to think I had turned back on my path. I realized too late that what led me back to the castle was not the befuddlement of a man unused to this rough country, but the inexorable pull of a master who would have his possessions returned to him.

One can only imagine my horror at discovering the black towers of the Castle before me, and I do not think--not even now--that I can adequately write out the fear it was with which I realized that my steps would never lead any ways other than its gates. When I finally resigned myself to this, it was almost no shock that the perpetually locked doors should stand open to me for the first time since that damnable night in May when first I arrived.

The Count, looking almost as young as myself now, stood in wait for me. It was as if all the particulars of our first meeting were happening over again--as if there had been no lapse in time between that hateful day that I first set foot here and this moment of my final defeat. He did not mock me now. He made no speech and spoke no villainy. He merely waved me into the castle where now I lie in pain.

“It is well you go to our chambers, Mr. Harker. You and I have an appointment to keep.”

The devil in hell cannot know what it was to obey that command, but obey it I did. I had at that moment abandoned all hope that I might countermand him, and I do not think he should have let me do anything other than what he requested.

I came to the room in which I now write. It is very old and bedecked with paintings and tapestries whose images seem ready to wear themselves down to dust. The Count bade me then undress myself, and I did so, realizing at that instant that he was no stranger to the sight of my body. It was as if some cloud then began to lift from my mind, and I had a sobering moment in which all the worst agonies of my ordeal were clear to me.

“You have been of great service to me, Mr. Harker. I have enjoyed your company all these days greatly, and I intend now to fully repay you all that you are most assuredly owed.”

It seemed then that the great gash I had left upon his brow shone brighter than the moonlight that fell upon it, and I thought in that awful moment that I should like to faint or to die, or in some way else to will myself very far away.

“On your knees, Mr. Harker.”

I knelt, and I thought it to be of my own volition. As he approached me, I shuddered, but I did not flee. 

He took hold of me very suddenly, and I marveled as my body responded immediately to his embrace. He fell upon me with a savagery not native to anything but the basest of animals, and I managed to give a shout as he buried his sharp teeth in my neck. The feeling of it was one that I recognize now as having thrilled through my body dozens of times before, but it was prolonged this time, as he did not withdraw his mouth for a good while but rather worried at my poor throat. 

It was as though he wished to tear me apart.

Oh that he had!--Oh would that I were spared from this and from all that must come to follow!

When he finally released me, he flung me to the floor, where I lay a while, unable to do aught but marvel at the blood flowing freely from my wound. I caught some in my hand, and I realized then that I had the most curious and unseemly desire to lap it up like a dog. When next the Count took hold of me, I turned to see that his shirt was open and that he had opened a long narrow wound upon his chest. He wrenched his fingers into my hair then and pressed me close to him.

“Drink, my good boy. Drink and become mine. I have savored you long as the peasants enjoy the grapes prior to harvest, but now…”

He held me fast against the wound, suffocatingly so.

“...oh… now it is time to crush and bruise you, to ruin you such that you might be the wine to warm me in the winter. You shall be my seneschal--my little raven who knows when to follow in the army’s wake. I shall leave you keen for fresh blood and keen for all the pleasures of the flesh I would wring from you. Drink! Drink now and come to my flesh--drink and give yourself over to me!”

I thought to resist. I thought to push him away. He held me so close, however, that it seemed I would choke if I did not open my mouth, and in doing so I tasted his blood.

I would like to think that this was through some damnable spell or caprice--I would like to think that he took hold of my faculties as he had before, and it was by his will that I began to lap at his injury like some mean animal, my tongue pressed close to his flesh as though he were so much fruit to be devoured. God! The taste of him on my lips--the scent of his skin as he held me there--

My face was smeared with it when he finally pulled me away, and he laughed as he cupped my chin in his hand and brought me to kiss him. I let him do so, and have let him do more since. He took hold of my parts then, and stroked me eagerly--and I--thoroughly damned as I must be, allowed and continue to allow him every liberty.

The fire of his blood in my body and the fire in my loins are commingled now. I would commit any blasphemy, undergo any degradation before I would leave off this wretched lust with which I am taken. I hate him most abjectly--not only for what he has done and what he no doubt will do--but for the fact that he has made me his beyond all redemption. Were I to try, I know I would find no solace in attempting resistance.

Let me continue.

Once he saw me hard again, he told me to go to where my clothing lay and to retrieve from my things the diary “of which he had grown so fond.” It is in this diary and in that chamber that I am writing now, his hands pressed close against the point where my throat has been torn. I have been given use of the little table over which I have been made to lean, and he had bidden me write out an account of this encounter.

“Your writing has been such a joy to me, Mr. Harker. You are so adept at capturing all the details of the moment--all the little minutiae of human sensation. I want this culminating moment to be put to record so that I might enjoy it as I have enjoyed all your other writings--that I might keep this final delight fresh in my memory.”

It was at that point that I started this final entry--the last I shall no doubt ever write as a man.

As I began my account, he took the blood that trailed down my neck and dragged it across my heated body, finally taking his hand, still wet with it, that he might stroke me further. I have written here, in a continual pitch of ecstasy, as he has continued. All the poetry men have written of hell and its horrors cannot capture the loathsomeness of these straits in which I find myself.

After stroking my prick for some time, he took me by the hips and began to work his blood-slick fingers into me--now thankfully shed somehow of their claw-like nails. I have thought--again and again--that I must bolt, that I must fight or flee or go mad. He has hit upon some chord in me that he might play to his liking. I feel myself grow more inflamed as he grazes it. 

I must have known since I first entered this room that the Count would take me thus, but it was not a thought to which my mind would give full confession until he began. 

Oh God--Oh God that I have invoked so many times through this narrative without succor--How can I endure? How is it that I should write this final act of conquest even as his prick is still buried in my flesh and his teeth buried in my neck. He took me slowly, watching me writhe as I endeavored not to lose my grip on this pen. I felt him press in by degrees, and I felt at each instant that there was some new boundary violated, that each quavering thrust forward of his hips was to cross another threshold. When his full length was in me, I must have cried out, for he clapped a hand over my mouth as he withdrew, shoving himself roughly back inside of me all at once and much to my agony.

I confess now that I lost myself to frenzy then--frenzy and fear. After however many encounters, dreaming or awake, I fought him and saw how useless a thing fighting is. The page prior, on which there is nothing save a great smear of my own blood, stands as its own sort of testament.

He laughed, pinned me down, plunged into me hard while my own inflamed parts ached at the feeling of him in me. I cannot say that I will not break apart in the agony of this coupling--that I will remain capable of giving this last testament to my sorrows. He is rutting into me like a machine, pistoning hard into me as I perform the perverse absurdity of serving as amanuensis. I am left to thrust at nothing but the hot night air.

“Oh, Mr. Harker,” he said but minutes ago, “Your time of crisis draws near. Try to keep up your work as best you can.”

It is now that he buries his teeth in my neck again--for what I presume is the last time. I know that this is how I am to die, then, a poor vessel being drained of my blood and filled with his spend while he abuses me with indignities too cruel to mention.

I can hear the pounding of the blood as it flows out of me. I feel the weight of a final darkness descending. But to die like this--to die in this prolonged agony after which I can only hope to kick at heaven.

Oh God. Oh God. Oh God. I will end it here. I am done.

Heaven and Mina forgive me.

* * *

Later.

I know not how to rectify this most recent turn with my desperate wishes to believe myself a sane man. 

I have been writing in this diary for some time now, making a record of the Count’s cruel use of me. As the last page of this account no doubt attests, I believed myself not too long ago to be on the verge of death itself:-- to be about to perish in the most abominable straits and to awaken to some wretched existence as some _thing_ outside the grace of God.

I am--if I reckon correctly--still a man.

At the apex of all I have described before, when I left off writing, it seemed that the Count’s assault on me brought me to one final climax: one last instant of abasement before I was to die. 

After I spent myself, however--after that final despoilment--I fell to the table upon which I write. 

All ceased then. I felt the grip of my tormentor no longer. When I turned about to look behind me, I saw that the room was empty, and that I was alone, kneeling, and seemingly in the aftermath of some wretched episode of self-abuse. I was naked still, but my body lay intact. There was no wound at my throat. There was no evidence that any creature save myself had laid a hand upon me.

I know not what to think. I dare not re-read what my hand has just written, and I still must flee this place if I have the means to do so. As I depart, I have determined that I shall tear out this entry entirely and scatter it to the wilds below. 

I wish no recollection or record of whatever madness it is I have just endured. If I ever escape this place, let it be that such fevered imaginings are left behind me.

* * *

**POST SCRIPT**

Let me be brief. I must make some statement as regards these papers, although it is my fervent hope that they need never be read. Dr. Van Helsing found them folded into a _Bradshaw’s_ guide among the Count's papers in Piccadilly, and he made the wise decision to withhold them from our little band for a while. They were left out of the compilation of documents our little band sent to Mr. Stoker for reasons which should be self-evident. Mr. Harker, who ranks among the truest of friends and bravest of men I have known, is alive and whole. He bears no marks of the _nosferatu’s_ kiss that I or the professor have ever been able to ascertain. For this, I am grateful.

We have determined between us that these are either some licentious forgery or a genuine record of what was--in fact--a series of ill dreams. It must go without saying that Mrs. Harker has not been made aware of this document, and it is by common agreement that we have determined that she never will. She is a good woman and does not deserve any of the miseries that reading these papers would visit on her. They have fallen to my keeping in the meantime. In a morbid way, they are not out of place here--housed among so many other records of lunacy and decline. 

I have long pondered them. It has been my conclusion that while they are similar enough to the character of my friend’s writing, the diseased nature of their contents is surely the work of somebody in the throes of criminal degeneracy. If they were ever penned by Jonathan Harker’s hand--which I doubt--it must be at the behest of some malevolent influence. I cannot attribute to my friend the morbid temperament necessary to compose such a damnable document, unless he has in some way hidden his true self from the world better than any man living. 

The only points that speak in favor of the documents' legitimacy are the weathered state of the final pages and the presence of a single leaf smeared with a large splotch of blood, which the author notes in the midst of the penultimate entry. I have--at present--no conclusive explanation for these features. It hardly seems suspect, however, that blood should be found among a vampire’s personal papers. Horrid as it seems, it would not surprise me to imagine that stain as the evidence of some other repast, which was then placed with the rest of the documents by chance or else added to them for the sake of lending this ghoulish narration the illusion of authenticity.

I close with full confidence that the events outlined above never occurred.

\-- John Seward, 1898

**Author's Note:**

> See my [profile](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeathCorporal/profile) for notes on remixes, podfic, derivative works, and constructive criticism.
> 
> * * *
> 
> With thanks to Gammarad for betaing.


End file.
